Bandhanamokkha Jataka

At Jetavana, the Buddha was asked about Cinca, a woman who had publicly and falsely accused him of wrongdoing. He told his monks that this was not the first time Cinca had leveled a false charge against him; she had done the very same thing once before, in a far older life, and he recounted that older story in full.

In that former age, the Bodhisatta served as chaplain to the king of Benares, a man of deep learning and unbroken restraint. The king had once promised his queen that he would grant her any wish she named, and she had asked that he never again look with desire upon another woman. Reluctant at first, the king kept his word so completely that he turned his eyes from even the loveliest dancers of his own court.

When a border uprising called the king away to lead his troops, he arranged for messengers to pass daily between the battlefield and the palace, thirty-two riding out and thirty-two riding back, so that he and the queen would never lose touch. In his long absence, the queen drew every one of these sixty-four messengers into her confidence and her bed, trusting that the king's campaign would keep him away long enough that none of it would ever surface.

As the king's victorious return drew near, the queen grew desperate to secure her secret, and she turned to the one man positioned to expose her: the Bodhisatta, who had overseen the palace in the king's absence. She summoned him and demanded that he become complicit in her secret, threatening him if he refused. The Bodhisatta refused at once, telling her plainly that he would neither betray his king's trust nor break the restraint he had kept his whole life. Furious at being refused, the queen tore at her own skin, disordered her clothing, and took to her bed, ready to greet the returning king with the appearance of having been grievously wronged.

The queen told the king on his return that the Bodhisatta had forced his way into her chambers and tried to dishonor her. Blind with rage at the thought, the king ordered the chaplain bound in chains and led through the city toward execution, giving no one a chance to speak in his defense.

As the execution drums began to sound, the Bodhisatta's composure never broke. He asked his guards to grant him one more audience with the king before the sentence was carried out, saying only that he had something of great value the king would wish to hear before it was lost along with him. Curious despite his fury, the king agreed to see him once more.

Standing bound before the throne, the Bodhisatta made no appeal to pity. He asked the king to summon the sixty-four messengers who had traveled between the battlefield and the palace during his absence, and to question them directly rather than take anyone's word alone. When the messengers were brought forward and questioned, the truth came out from their own mouths, plain enough that no one in the hall could doubt it any longer.

Horrified at how close his own anger had carried him to killing an innocent man, the king ordered that the sixty-four messengers be beheaded for their part in the deception. The Bodhisatta would not allow even that. He pleaded first for the messengers, saying they had acted under the queen's compulsion rather than real choice of their own, and then pleaded separately for the queen herself, saying that returning harm for harm would only add a second wrong to the first. The king, moved by a mercy he had not expected from a man he had nearly executed, pardoned them all and freed the Bodhisatta from his chains.

The Bodhisatta then asked the king for only one thing: permission to give up the world. He said that the bonds of worldly life, woven from desire and jealousy, were a far tighter prison than the chains he had just been freed from, and that only renunciation offered a freedom worth keeping. He withdrew to the Himalayas and cultivated deep meditative attainment. In time he was identified by the Buddha as that same chaplain, with Ananda as the king of that age and Cinca herself as the queen whose falsehood had once nearly cost an innocent man his life. Jataka No. 120 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling.

The teaching the Bodhisatta offered at the height of his own peril is the hinge the whole story turns on: foolish and false words bind the innocent in undeserved chains, while true words, rightly spoken, release them again. He did not plead, threaten, or beg for his life when he was granted his final audience. He simply asked the king to examine the facts through the sixty-four people who could confirm or deny them, trusting the truth itself to do the work that no amount of pleading ever could.